Good point @sundialsvc4 - and well put.
Cheers, Clock.
Okay First up very sorry for being missing… had a lot of pending school assignments…
This project is giving me headaches now… I have done the rig perfectly fine however no matter what I do I cannot get it to move or join to the engine properly… I got so frustated that I deleted my 12+ hours of work on the rig plus punched my desk and the adjacent wall(and now my hand pains too :(). So I just started over again and made another rig. Now I need the engine and the rig as one object so that it can be later used in a game rest of my team is working on. I have tried everything I possibly could and still cant get the parenting right…
P.S- Small Troll suggests that the weird jumping problem I encountered can be due to the change of coding form v2.64 to v2.74. So shall I try rolling back to v2.64 and try making the rig and the engine again from scratch??
Select the mesh of the engine, not the wheels or drive parts - these should ideally be separate meshes, then SHIFT-Select the armature and key CTRL+P - chose “With Empty Groups”. Next select the mesh and go to Edit Mode, then select all vertices. Then go to the Vertex Groups panel and select the “root” bone and click “Assign”.
If you don’t have a root bone - create one as this is where all the non-moving parts should be assigned.
Failing this post me the blend file and I will look at it.
Cheers, Clock.
I must say I’m a jerk… for I tried it for a whole week and couldn’t do it… anyways here are the blends of the rig and the engine… Previously I got the wheels rotating by using drivers but that looked kinda unrealistic… If this fails I’ll use drivers again and find a way to make a piston rod rotate along with it…
Here are the .blends also any suggestions about the design of the engine or the wheels will be greatly appreciated…
Engine.blend (1.81 MB)Engine wheels mk 3_fixed.blend (1.26 MB)
P.S- Sorry bro I forgot to remove the driver wheels from the engine… u may remove them urself… just delete the toruses
A good start, but you need to look at some images of steam locos and learn how to set these as background images in your 3D view so you can draw from them as references. Just do an internet search for Steam Loco images and you will get plenty of ideas.
Keep up the good work.
Cheers, Clock.
4 complete months and I’m still sitting on the same model… I just CAN’T parent my rig to the engine!!! No matter what every time that I try to parent them they just go off in awkward directions… Can anyone please please PLEASE tell me how do I connect/join/parent my rig to my engine???
But I guess the main question in here is solved so I’ll post a new thread regarding this question… But any answers are welcome here… Please I am in need if serious help here…
P.S- I know I’m an idiot but sorry that’s the I can learn…
You should be parenting the model to the armature, not the other way around. Select the mesh first, then SHIFT Select the armature and key CTRL+P - then chose your parent type, I would go for “Empty Groups” then assign the vertices to the correct bone group. Also - make sure you have no unapplied rotations or scales, etc. - post the blend file here if you cannot solve the issue and I will look at it for you.
Cheers, Clock.
Wondering why didn’t I thought of that… Anyways parenting looks fine but some more problems have arised… Now my rig has two armatures… One for moving the piston rod and the connecting rods (used Inverse Kinematics) and the other one is used to rotate the central wheel (whose rotation I copied to the other two wheels using the copy rotation modifier…) Now what is happening is that when I try to move my rig (by selecting everything) stuff just flies away… the cause of which is that my central wheel(to which I applied the rotation armature) moves up and down when I move it along the Y axis and moves along the Y axis when I move it along the Z axis… Another thing is that when I try to move my drive rod(constraing to the Y axis) it moves in both Y and Z axis. And if I try to rotate the whole rig God knows why everything rotates in every direction but in the direction I want them to. I think the reason for this might be my use of modifiers for limiting useless rotations…
Also this model is gonna go in a game that the rest of my team is working on… We’ll be making it in CryEngine 3. And yeah half of my models are made in cycles and a few (including this one ) in blender render. So will there be any sort if problems when I import these models in CryEngine?? And will it dance in CryEngine too like it is dancing in here??
Here are the .blends…
- Wheels - Engine wheels mk 3_fixed.blend (1.26 MB)
- Engine - Engine.blend (1.81 MB)
P.S I am going to remodel the engine as this one looks very childish, unreal and unprofessional… I am gonna model a better one but for now all the parenting experiments are going on the current engine prototype.
Thanks a lot bro…
You should only have one armature - go back to post 4 and look at the rig I gave you - that is how it should be done, or one way anyways. The wheel should be driving the whole thing, I think you have overcomplicated the setup and this setup you have will never work properly.
You should select one render engine and stay with that.
Cheers, Clock.
Alrighty… I’ll make a fresh rig on the basis of the one you sent me… will require some knacking but I’ll try my best… Thanks for all the help…